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Team DMDave 's Statement on AI Art
🕑 Added 2022-12-17 18:31:56 +0000 UTCHey all!
I thought I might address the elephant in the room this afternoon (well, one of many elephants this year, but I digress), and that's art created via artificial intelligence.
As some of you noticed, some of our content this year used A.I. art, particularly from MidJourney/Stable Diffusion. We used it to replace the stock art that we typically used in our adventures and VTT packages. Then we used our regular artists (Nacho and Matias Lazaro) to focus on some other cool projects we've been tinkering with in the background (monster books, a horror RPG setting, etc.)
At the time, V3 was the only version out, and while it was pretty cool looking compared to most of our stock art, it was still only so-so and didn't really look like other artists' work. However, with the arrival of V4 and the remarkable quality it produces—which, as we now understand, was scraped from actual living artists' works—we realize that there are some serious ethical issues with these tools.
We have no way to predict what the outcome of all of this will be, and while I personally think the art it makes is awesome and seriously game-changing (and incredibly convenient for a storyteller like me, I might add), I also respect the many wonderful artists I've had the pleasure of working with over the years who, rightfully so, feel threatened by its presence.
As such, we will discontinue the use of AI art in our commercial products for now, at least, until we learn the full legal ramifications of using the artwork or the creators of MidJourney and similar applications compensate the artists whose creations they used to gather data.
In the meantime, I've invested a considerable amount into licensing art and have even hired a couple more artists on our staff to work on future projects.
Feel free to ask me any questions you have here in the comments or on Discord.
Thanks, everyone!
Comments
virtuadept
We'll make great PETS for our AI masters.
Terry
Take a wait and see approach is reasonable. The witch hunt that is starting on the web is not. 😎👍🏻
DM Dave
In the words of another AI, Agent Smith, "... it is inevitable."
OnionBun
For sure, I'm sure they originally did it just for the point of testing, but it's an open source available model. People are going to use it to make a quick buck no matter what.
DM Dave
I suspect it was a "better to ask for forgiveness than permission" type thing. It sure did allow them to get data super quick
DM Dave
Yeah, so, I use ChatGPT, and my stance so far is that I am a writer and a copywriter and I welcome with open arms anything that makes my job easier. I won't outsource it, since only I know how to market/write the type of stuff I want, but at the same time, having it write 3-4 paragraphs of decent copy that I can clean up saves me time to work on better things. Copywriting isn't hard, but it is a very specific, formulaic process.
OnionBun
Yeah I was wondering why v4 was such a leap. Turns out they cheated. Oh well.
Holy Pickle
Same discussion on chatgpt will happen soon. For a non-artsy type it’s great to have a tool to visualize whats in your brain - but I do use fiverr to commission art when there is something specific I need (as opposed to brainstorming with ai to bring my thoughts to life). I can appreciate the argument about people who take the time to hone their skill and want to make sure that investment in time and effort is compensated for. If I had those skills, I’m sure I’d also be in that camp.
DM Dave
Oh, trust me. I've had the arguments, and I've read a lot about IP law and art philosophy even before this debacle started, so I'm very much "it's murky." But it's just better to step back until the sentiment is a little better. I don't need it so bad that I'm willing to put my relationships with super-talented and fun artists at risk. Know what I mean?
Terry
I’m not sure the case is that clear. Painters cried foul when the camera was developed because it was the end of art. Same happened with digital editing and painters cried foul. In neither case did it overtake handmade painting art. With respect to training an ai on art, is there any painter who can says they never studied masterpieces, our studied art in their field? Many fantasy artists today give credit to Vallejo. I think a lot of the problem is not understanding that AI training is like a human being learning by doing. What it creates later may have had some influence by what it learned from but is original content. Food for thought -Stable Diffusion was trained on approximately 240 TB of data. But it itself, is only about 4GB. The original art isn’t in their. It learned what art is and how it’s created, techniques used, colour theory. Very similar to an artist painting a dragon and taking inspiration from Todd Lockwood.
Victor Navone
Glad to hear this. Thanks for the thoughtful consideration!
